In Tokyo, a Japanese man waits for a train under LED lights, which are designed to calm people and prevent them from jumping onto the tracks. Japan has one of the highest suicide rates in the world, and ten thousand suicides since 1997 are said to be related to overwork, according to a government survey.
View the slideshow by the photographer Shiho Fukada who has been looking at the symbiotic relationship between Japan’s current political turmoil and its unemployment crisis for The New Yorker.
“Hostesses, women paid to flirt with men at bars or clubs, were once frowned upon along with sex workers — though the vast majority say they never sleep with customers,” writes Shiho Fukada
Fukada continues, “But the job has become mainstream, and an increasingly popular career move for young Japanese women. Hostesses grace talk shows, star in television dramas, and have become models and entrepreneurs.”
Pulitzer Center grantee Shiho Fukada captures the various faces and places of Japan’s disposable workers. Stable full-time jobs are becoming scarce as companies increasingly favor hiring easily-fired and re-scheduled part-time workers. Some 3000 workers now live in 24-hour internet cafes, while others wait in long lines for temporary employment and women compete for hostess jobs. Depression and suicide rates are skyrocketing.
“[Japanese] people suffer in private, in their homes, so I thought it was a really important story to tell, Fukada told Coburn Dukehart, for NPR’sThe Picture Show.
Overworked to Suicide After the recession of the 1990s, Japan’s white collar salarymen increasingly must work arduous hours for fear of losing their jobs. This often leads to depression and suicide.
Net Cafe Refugees Internet cafes have existed in Japan for over a decade, but in the mid 2000’s, customers began using these spaces as living quarters. Internet cafe refugees are mostly temporary employees, their salary too low to rent their own apartments.
Dumping Ground Kamagasaki, Osaka, Japan used to be a thriving day laborer’s town. Today, it is home to approximately 25,000 unemployed and elderly men, many of whom are also homeless.
Japan’s structural economic problems are further alienating its already marginalized populations. Photojournalist Shiho Fukada goes beyond the bright lights of Tokyo to document the country’s unemployment crisis: disposable workers who are easily fired and live without a social safety net. They are usually shut out from the rest of the society, living in poverty but rarely acknowledged by their fellow citizens. Fukada’s photographs add a human face to widely discussed issues—from day laborers living on the streets to educated women taking banal jobs. She reveals the other side of Japan where alcoholism, hopelessness and suicide are increasingly commonplace.
Photojournalist and Pulitzer Center grantee Shiho Fukada documents the lives of workers who have suffered through the transformation of an economic system that once guaranteed lifetime employment, but now discards unwanted labor. This three-part documentary, produced by MediaStorm in collaboration with the Pulitzer Center, is available for licensing or embedding.
Overworked to Suicide After the recession of the 1990s, Japan’s white collar salarymen increasingly must work arduous hours for fear of losing their jobs. This often leads to depression and suicide.
Net Cafe Refugees Internet cafes have existed in Japan for over a decade, but in the mid 2000’s, customers began using these spaces as living quarters. Internet cafe refugees are mostly temporary employees, their salary too low to rent their own apartments.
Dumping Ground Kamagasaki, Osaka, Japan used to be a thriving day laborer’s town. Today, it is home to approximately 25,000 unemployed and elderly men, many of whom are also homeless.
Photojournalist Shiho Fukada documents the lives of workers who have suffered through the transformation of an economic system that once guaranteed lifetime employment, but now discards unwanted labor. This three-part documentary, produced by MediaStorm in collaboration with the Pulitzer Center, is available for licensing or embedding.
Overworked to Suicide After the recession of the 1990s, Japan’s white collar salarymen increasingly must work arduous hours for fear of losing their jobs. This often leads to depression and suicide.
Net Cafe Refugees Internet cafes have existed in Japan for over a decade, but in the mid 2000’s, customers began using these spaces as living quarters. Internet cafe refugees are mostly temporary employees, their salary too low to rent their own apartments.
Dumping Ground Kamagasaki, Osaka, Japan used to be a thriving day laborer’s town. Today, it is home to approximately 25,000 unemployed and elderly men, many of whom are also homeless.
TOKYO, Japan — Hostesses, women paid to flirt with men at bars or clubs, were once frowned upon along with sex workers — though the vast majority say they never sleep with customers.
But the job has become mainstream, and an increasingly popular career move for young Japanese women. Hostesses grace talk shows, star in television dramas, and have become models and entrepreneurs.
There are at least 70,000 hostess bars and clubs in Japan, according to Japan’s National Police agency. Experts say the job’s newfound popularity reflects — at least in part — a lack of professional opportunities for Japanese women.
“There are many girls who dream of becoming a hostess these days, but there are also women who chose hostessing because there is no other work for them,” says Eriko Fuse, whose organization represents cabaret club workers.
More than 70 percent of low-paying part-time jobs are held by women. Only 65 percent of college-educated Japanese women are employed, compared with 80 percent in the United States, according to a report by Kathy Matsui, a managing director at Goldman Sachs Japan. It is “a significant lost economic opportunity for the nation,” she says.
The numbers tell a grim story: Women earn only 69.8 percent of what men make in Japan. And just 9.8 percent of managers are women, according to International Labor Organization, compared with 42.7 percent in the US. While Japan ranks as the 3rd largest economy in the world, it ranks 104th in women’s economic participation and opportunity out of 136 countries.
Overworked to Suicide After the recession of the 1990s, Japan’s white collar salarymen increasingly must work arduous hours for fear of losing their jobs. This often leads to depression and suicide.
Net Cafe Refugees Internet cafes have existed in Japan for over a decade, but in the mid 2000’s, customers began using these spaces as living quarters. Internet cafe refugees are mostly temporary employees, their salary too low to rent their own apartments.
Dumping Ground Kamagasaki, Osaka, Japan used to be a thriving day laborer’s town. Today, it is home to approximately 25,000 unemployed and elderly men, many of whom are also homeless.
Millions of women from poor countries work as caregivers in America, part of a massive but largely invisible workforce. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 1.3 million childcare workers were employed in the United States in 2012. However, given that 8.2 million children spend time with a daycare provider, these numbers swell if unreported care providers are included.
As Pulitzer Center grantee Alissa Quart notes in a feature story for The Nation, many of these foreign women are forced to make the difficult decision to leave their own children behind, to say nothing of spouses and aging parents. “University researchers studying Latina immigrants in Los Angeles estimated that 24 percent of housekeepers and 82 percent of live-in nannies have left kids behind. What happens when so many families—and children—are living so far apart?” Alissa writes.
Alissa explains that many of these immigrant nannies hire even-lower-wage caretakers back home. The monetary value of women’s labor declines as one follows the chain from Global North to Global South. The chain works by separating wage earners from their dependents.
MORE NANNIES
This week we are pleased to announce that Ana P. Santos, a multimedia journalist from the Philippines, will be our 2014 Persephone Miel Fellow.
Ana is already at work on our Nanny project, preparing a series of articles and a video about the tens of thousands of Filipino women who leave their families to find work abroad. According to Ana, about 10 percent, or $18.6 billion of the Philippines GDP, comes from remittances sent home by migrant workers. Almost half of the migrant workers from the Philippines are women, filling vacancies in the service sector mostly as nannies and domestic helpers.
Ana says that most of them view migration as a temporary situation and necessary sacrifice to obtain the two things that would secure a future for their children: a home and an education. But for many of these women, this simple aspiration comes at a cost that cannot be translated into monetary terms.
DEAD END JOBS FOR JAPANESE WOMEN
Even in the wealthy countries of Asia job opportunities for women are scarce. In Japan, only 65 percent of women with college degrees have jobs while more than 70 percent of the country’s low wage or part-time jobs are occupied by women.
Pulitzer Center grantee Shiho Fukada, in this video forGlobalPost and NBC News, looks at the growing phenomenon of hostessing—women paid to flirt with men at bars or clubs. “The job has become mainstream, and an increasingly popular career move for young Japanese women,” according to Shiho. “Hostesses grace talk shows, star in television dramas, and have become models and entrepreneurs.”
There are now about 70,000 hostess bars and clubs in Japan, and experts say the job’s newfound popularity reflects a lack of professional opportunities for Japanese women. Until next week,
TOKYO, Japan — Hostesses, women paid to flirt with men at bars or clubs, were once frowned upon along with sex workers — though the vast majority say they never sleep with customers.
But the job has become mainstream, and an increasingly popular career move for young Japanese women. Hostesses grace talk shows, star in television dramas, and have become models and entrepreneurs.
There are at least 70,000 hostess bars and clubs in Japan, according to Japan’s National Police agency. Experts say the job’s newfound popularity reflects — at least in part — a lack of professional opportunities for Japanese women.
“There are many girls who dream of becoming a hostess these days, but there are also women who chose hostessing because there is no other work for them,” says Eriko Fuse, whose organization represents cabaret club workers.
More than 70 percent of low-paying part-time jobs are held by women. Only 65 percent of college-educated Japanese women are employed, compared with 80 percent in the United States, according to a report by Kathy Matsui, a managing director at Goldman Sachs Japan. It is “a significant lost economic opportunity for the nation,” she says.
The numbers tell a grim story: Women earn only 69.8 percent of what men make in Japan. And just 9.8 percent of managers are women, according to International Labor Organization, compared with 42.7 percent in the US. While Japan ranks as the 3rd largest economy in the world, it ranks 104th in women’s economic participation and opportunity out of 136 countries.
Shiho Fukada documents the lives of disposable workers in Japan in stories that illustrate the global unemployment crisis and the growing gap between rich and poor.
Major European outlets prominently featured the work of our photographers last week. Sean Gallagher’s stark and stunning images documentingclimate change on the Tibetan Plateaucan be seen in this audio slideshow forThe Guardian. Meanwhile, Shiho Fukada’s photo essay on the lives of under-employed or unemployed Japanese workers forced to live in Internet cafes, part of her project on Japan’s disintegrating social safety net, appeared inLe Monde’s weekly magazine M.
Meet Pulitzer Center grantee and photojournalist Shiho Fukada. In this video, she explains her reporting project “Japan’s Disposable Workers.” Japan’s structural economic problems are further alienating its already marginalized populations. She went beyond the bright lights of Tokyo to document the country’s unemployment crisis: disposable workers who are easily fired and live without a social safety net. They are usually shut out from the rest of the society, living in poverty but rarely acknowledged by their fellow citizens.
Fukada’s distinctive photographs add a human face to widely discussed issues—from day laborers living on the streets to educated women taking banal jobs. She reveals the other side of Japan where alcoholism, hopelessness and suicide have become increasingly commonplace.
We’re highlighting our female journalists all week for International Women’s Day on March 8th.
Pulitzer Center grantee Shiho Fukada captures the various faces and places of Japan’s disposable workers. Stable full-time jobs are becoming scarce as companies increasingly favor hiring easily-fired and re-scheduled part-time workers. Some 3000 workers now live in 24-hour internet cafes, while others wait in long lines for temporary employment and women compete for hostess jobs. Depression and suicide rates are skyrocketing.
“[Japanese] people suffer in private, in their homes, so I thought it was a really important story to tell, Fukada told Coburn Dukehart, for NPR’sThe Picture Show.
Image 1: Tadayuki Sakai, 42, worked as a salaryman for a credit-card company for twenty years. He moved to an Internet café shortly after quitting his job, and currently works as a telephone operator and temps at a friend’s computer systems company. Image by Shiho Fukada. Japan, 2012.
Image 2: In Tokyo, a Japanese man waits for a train under LED lights, which are designed to calm people and prevent them from jumping onto the tracks. Japan has one of the highest suicide rates in the world, and 10,000 suicides since 1997 are said to be related to overwork, according to a government survey. Image by Shiho Fukada. Japan, 2012.
Learn more about Japan’s jobs crisis and see more of Pulitzer Center grantee Shiho Fukada’s photographs here.
The Pulitzer Center is an innovative award-winning non-profit journalism organization dedicated to supporting the independent international journalism.
Follow Field Notes for dispatches by Pulitzer Center journalists in the field, or visit us on Instagram @pulitzercenter
![Pulitzer Center grantee Shiho Fukada captures the various faces and places of Japan’s disposable workers. Stable full-time jobs are becoming scarce as companies increasingly favor hiring easily-fired and re-scheduled part-time workers. Some 3000 workers now live in 24-hour internet cafes, while others wait in long lines for temporary employment and women compete for hostess jobs. Depression and suicide rates are skyrocketing.
“[Japanese] people suffer in private, in their homes, so I thought it was a really important story to tell, Fukada told Coburn Dukehart, for NPR’sThe Picture Show.
View more of Shiho’s photos and stories on Japan’s disposable workers here.](https://web.archive.org/web/20151028215854im_/http://41.media.tumblr.com/ad910aa811c3b03123d6060b53f743d7/tumblr_ng9ujpKzAO1qdltkno1_500.png)
